


Making a List

by hauntedlittledoll



Category: Batman (Comics), Red Robin (Comics), Robin (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Recommended Reading List
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 20:49:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3425108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hauntedlittledoll/pseuds/hauntedlittledoll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim rereads some of his old books while benched.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making a List

**Author's Note:**

> Title and epigraph taken Shel Silverstein’s “I’m Making a List.”

> _"I’m making a list of the things I must say for politeness,_
> 
> _And goodness and kindness and gentleness, sweetness and rightness:_

* * *

 

Tim’s benched over a broken collarbone.

He’s tried to point out the dramatic heights of hypocrisy to various family members, but no one’s particularly sympathetic.

Bruce sheepishly backs up Dick’s decision.  Alfred confiscates his suits for a thorough inspection and upgrade.  Steph ‘borrows’ his bike for the next few months.  Babs locks him out of all Bat systems, and Damian assumes Tim’s W. E. responsibilities and paperwork with more glee than any self-respecting ten year old should possess for budget meetings.

Someone (and by _someone_ , Tim means Cass) even threatened the Titans out of giving Red Robin sanctuary.

He can’t even wander Gotham in civvies or the Red Hood will tattle on him, because Jason is _actually five_.

After two days in his apartment, Tim realizes that he needs a project.

Since all Bat, Wayne, and Titan responsibilities have been delegated to other parties, Tim decides to work on a few Drake ones instead.  At the very least, Tim can work his way through a few more boxes from his parents’ storage unit.

It takes some bargaining.  Tim has to promise something like eight hours of sleep a night in order to win Alfred’s support, but in the end, Tim stands victorious.

Well, mostly he sits, because Cass is fiercely overprotective.

The babysitters are apparently non-negotiable.

It could be worse.  Dick might have appointed himself or Damian for the role.  The girls are much easier to work with.

So his sister brings the boxes to him, and Steph repacks and labels everything destined for donation.

Tim gives away almost everything.

Curtains and dishware and outdated electronics … Tim works around the piles that still hurt and the girls don’t comment, because they are wonderful human beings when not single-mindedly devoted to his well-being.

Dana’s medical journals and a few ugly beaded throw pillows share the same fate, but Tim does keep a rug that would look nice in his apartment and a set of novelty mugs from a trip his parents took before he was born.

"Tim."

He looks up from a sewing machine that hasn’t ever been used (he thinks Steph might like it).

Last box,” Cass warns, placing it on a nearby coffee table.  “Then lunch.”

"Sounds good," he agrees.  "How about **Julie’s**?  My treat.”

Cass makes an approving noise and knowingly carts the sewing machine out to Steph’s car.

Tim moves over to the last box and slides his penknife through the packing tape.  It’s marked **Attic** and from the weight, Tim half-expects it to be filled with cookbooks from his mother’s brief culinary exploits.

It’s not.

The box is crammed with thin, brightly-colored paperbacks—the kind of thing that Tim read when he was Damian’s age.  He pulls out one at random and grins like a fool at the tiny vampiric rabbit on the cover.

Tim sets it aside and crouches for a better look at his find.

A couple of the sequels are still in the box, and he finds the entire series for the **Lost in Space** reboot beneath them.  Tim thumbs through the other side which appears to be stand-alone books, hovering over an unassuming navy copy of **Dear Mr. Henshaw**.

Like his mother, Tim has had a number of short-lived ambitions.  Writing had given way quickly without anything to show for Tim’s brief obsession, but this book.

Tim pulls it and thumbs through the pages.  He tries to imagine writing letters like the boy in this book … asking a hero for life advice … asking _his_ _hero_ for life advice.

The mere salutation stretches credibility: _"Dear Batman."_

Bruce would have had a heart attack if Alfred ever brought such a letter with the man’s breakfast tray.  Even if the paranoia eventually subsided, Tim probably would have spent his formative years in a boarding school outside the country.

Maybe _"Dear Robin"_ … ?

Tim can’t help the undignified snort; Dick would have written _back_.

Eventually, he sits down right there on the floor and starts to read.

* * *

 

He gets a few weird looks at first.

Dick eyes Tim’s well-thumbed copy of **Say Cheese and Die!** like it’s an impending sign of the apocalypse.

His brother seems to be teetering on the precipice of true parenthood, because Dick obviously feels the need to lecture, but can’t quite figure out how to or if he even _should_ scold a seventeen year old for a scary kids’ book.

Barbara purses her lips when she spots the tell-tale slime on the cover, but she doesn’t say a word.

She may be a librarian, but Babs is also just a little bit of a book snob and if Jason was walking on the side of angels this week, they would be gossiping about Tim’s tragic taste behind Red Robin’s back.

Tim just smirks smugly at them all from his comfortable couch.

They’re the ones who had benched him.  They’re the ones who had forbidden any strenuous physical or mental activity.  They gave the order.

Tim is content to obediently follow said-order.  He’s bordering on _serene_ as he recuperates per Alfred’s instructions and lets the others wait on him hand and foot.

He isn’t patrolling.  He isn’t training.  He isn’t working.  He isn’t even studying.

He’s just _reading_.

Tim wonders which one will crack first.

* * *

 

"What is so terrible about third grade?"

Tim blinks at Damian over the top of his book.  His younger brother immediately looks away, gesturing irritably at the cover.

Right.

"Uh … nothing really.  It’s just kids being kids.  Social hierarchy.  Schoolyard jungle and all that.  It’s hard to fit in sometimes."

Damian makes a dismissive noise and returns to his forgiving canine as a pillow.  Tim watches the way that the younger boy toys with his cellphone.  Damian’s been sulking for days.  Ever since Bruce enrolled him in …

Tim suffers a belated epiphany.

"It’s just third grade though," Tim continues, trying to sound casual.  "Everything totally gets ironed out by fifth."

"Tt," Damian sneers.  "I wasn’t _worried_ , Drake.  Unlike you, _I_ can manage basic social interaction with my peers.”

_Screw being the responsible and mature older brother._

"Oh good," Tim says mildly, returning to his book.  "Then you can totally handle the secret initiation rites.  Oh, and pay attention to the morning announcements.  You never know when you might need it for a mission, but they always give out the daily password to the Teacher’s Lounge in code.  Usually part of the lunch menu, I think."

Just a few feet away, **The Best Christmas Pageant Ever** sits innocently on the coffee table, neatly obscuring the guilty sequel below.

* * *

 

"Oh, I love that book," Steph enthuses over breakfast one morning.  Her patrol had gone into the wee hours of the morning, and Steph chose Alfred’s cooking over grabbing something from the dining hall before class.

Tim tilts his head graciously as she drenches his plate in syrup and submits to the resounding kiss placed on the top of his head.

Damian growls from somewhere to the left.

“ **Matilda** isn’t my favorite,” Tim allows after a moment, “but it is pretty good.”

"Pretty good?" Steph scoffs, turning the syrup on her own plate.  "Try best book ever."  She points her fork at him for emphasis, but there’s a certain wistfulness in her expression.

Tim waits.

Steph studies her plate, thoroughly absorbed in cutting each pancake into an equal number of pieces.  “I used to pretend that I was Matilda sometimes … when I was a kid, you know?”

She doesn’t say it, but Tim hears it anyway: _"When things were bad."_

The connection is almost too easy; Tim can see how Steph would identify with a little girl who made it through a dreary home life by punishing her terrible parents in creative ways and using her gifts to become a secret champion for the downtrodden students of Crunchem Hall.

He wonders if Matilda was an early inspiration for becoming Spoiler.

"I could never decide between **James and the Giant Peach** or **Charlie and the Chocolate** **Factory** ,” Tim announces, guiding the conversation away from complicated memories.

Steph wrinkles her nose and gives an exaggerated shudder.  “I could never deal with the giant bugs.  I don’t care how nice they are to James, it’s just _too many legs_.”  She chews thoughtfully for a minute and then helps herself to the juice pitcher.   “ **Charlie** , I’ll give you.  It’s a classic.”

"The sequel lost some of the magic, but the first one …" Tim trails off.  "I still open candy bars carefully," he admitted.  "Just in case."

Steph laughs.

Damian seems torn between confusion and irritation, but fortunately decides to ignore them as Alfred returns to the table with a fresh stack of pancakes.

"If we are discussing the works of Roald Dahl, my preference has always been for **The BFG** ,” is the butler’s contribution.  “A few minor indiscretions aside, he had a rather noble mission.  And young Sophie was particularly well-mannered for her age.”

Tim hides his smile behind his book.

There was one thing that all of these books had in common and it was a theme that resounded with every Robin: despite feeling unwanted and lonely, each protagonist _was_ wanted by someone—was _chosen_ —for a grand adventure beyond their wildest dreams.

He thinks that even Damian could see the appeal in that.

* * *

 

When Tim shows up to his first ‘light’ therapy session with his nose buried in **The Headless Cupid** , Dick just takes a deep breath before running through the exercises.

Afterwards, Dick politely asks to borrow the book when Tim is finished with it.

The next time Tim sees his book, Dick is practically curled around it as he takes frantic notes on what did or didn’t work for a fictional blended family.

* * *

Early in their friendship, Tim had to hide Kon on relatively short notice.  He reluctantly left the super in his bedroom with the **Wayside School** books and a package of **Double-Stuff Oreos** to keep the relatively young clone occupied while Tim was stuck at school.

Tim remembers regretting that decision when he got home.  The cookies mostly, not the books, because Kon was still sugar high at that point and had excitedly recounted the series from beginning to end while Tim cleaned up all evidence of Super-induced damage.

Until Tim started rereading everything, he had forgotten how much his friend loved these ridiculous books.  Kon spent more than one afternoon that first year lying low in Tim’s room, flipping through the series again and again without ever growing bored.

Tim remembers having to dig them out all over again for Bart to read at Kon’s insistence.  He doesn’t remember how they were passed along to Cassie, but he does remember watching her read them for the first time while the entire team was down with the flu.

After that, the 19th story quickly became an in-joke amongst the Young Justice team.

Where are the grown-ups?  _Oh … on the 19th story._

Where’s my book/snack/phone/left shoe?  _Did you check the 19th story?_

What’s the plan?  _19th story!_

There’s even a paper-clipping of a particularly memorable tabloid headline screaming: **"SUPERMAN?  SUPERBOY?  WHERE IS SUPERMOM?"** tucked in the pages of a sequel as a makeshift bookmark.  Someone (Bart) had scribbled _"She’s stuck on the 19th story"_ across the back.

When Tim finishes the last book, he remembers an era when his team blamed everything on dead rats and pranked new Titans by telling them that “goozack” was the new word for door in Bart’s future.

Sadly, they only got to play Way-High-Up-Ball once before Batman banned it on account of broken windows.

Mostly, Tim remembers when they were all just a bunch of kids hanging out in a crazy-tall building where the rules were a little different and everyone was weird, but they all just ran with it.

And remember all of this, Tim starts to wonder what would happen if he left these books on the kitchen counter next time he’s at the Tower.

Would anyone besides Kon reread them?  Would it make them smile?  Would they start making the old jokes again?

Would the series end up corrupting an entirely new generation of superheroes?

Is Way-High-Up-Ball still under the Bat-ban?

* * *

 

There’s a hardcover at the bottom of the box—a single volume of poetry.

Tim reads it out loud to Cass and enjoys her appreciation of the rollicking rhythms and rhymes.  Her obvious delight at unexpected deviations or nonsense wording is endearing, and Tim is glad to have the opportunity to share something like this with his sister.

This is something that Cass never would have picked up on her own.  Tim sees it in the reflective tilt of her head between pages as she studies the simple illustrations and small clusters of childish words.  He can see her mentally discard it as _silly_ and _impractical_ … a mere _children’s_ book.

Cass has always been more likely to sit down and work her way through a classic than to settle for something _easy_.  She’s always been her own worst critic.

So Tim starts another poem rather than let that self-recrimination settle.  He makes his voice rise and fall with the poem.  He speeds up, he slows down, and Tim reads **"Sick"** in the highest pitch he can manage just to surprise Cass into laughing.

This is just for them.

There will always be time to trade cutting Shakespearean insults with the Red Hood later.

* * *

 

He leaves a worn-out beige book for last.  It’s an older book than the others with pages soft from age.  _Janet Kramer_ is penned inside the cover in a younger hand than Tim remembers.  His own childish print is right below his mother’s, and Tim has never read this story for himself.

It was read to him on a rainy Saturday afternoon due to a canceled garden party.

Tim had been a little young for it at the time; he remembers thinking that his mother was the girl in the story and that the various adventures at the Met were his mother’s adventures.

His memories of the story details are fuzzy, but Tim’s memory of an unexpected afternoon spent curled against his mother’s side in his favorite window seat, listening to the rain and her crisp reading voice… this memory is astonishingly vivid.

Tim waits for a rainy day to read this book.  He searches out a vacant window seat in the manor, and makes himself comfortable before immersing himself in the mystery.

* * *

 

Tim’s great reading marathon lasts almost all three months of enforced downtime.

At the end, he packs most of the books back into their box for donation.  They barely fit, because even though Tim’s kept a few of the more sentimental books, he’s also picked up a handful to complete series that continued after Tim packed the books away the first time.

His mother’s book goes on the bookshelves in his apartment along with the poetry book and his solitary volume of **Goosebumps**.

_(He’s going to enjoy the way it makes Jason’s teeth grind for years to come.)_

He’s decided to take the **Wayside School** books to the tower and give them to Kon for good once the Titans are finished.

_(He doesn’t think his best friend will ever tire of the series, and Kon has an all new audience in Chris.)_

Steph still has her copy of **Matilda** , but she readily agrees to take the box of books off Tim’s hands.

_(He already knows where she’ll take them.  The public school in her district is in desperate need of funding, and Tim is going to turn W. E. in that direction once he gets back to work.  In the meanwhile, the kids that Steph’s befriended can really use the books.)_

Tim keeps just one more series, but not for himself.

Damian has been carefully ignoring Tim’s latest eccentricity, but Tim won’t let the younger boy get away with it.  He just has to be sneaky about this intervention.

Damian is currently locked in his room and has been all afternoon—supposedly working on homework, but Tim sincerely doubts the average fifth grade curriculum could pose this much difficulty to his alarmingly-precocious little brother.

Likewise, Tim doesn’t expect the **Fudge** series to hold Damian’s attention for long (Damian definitely prefers the epic fantasies that he thinks they don’t know about), but the implication should leave his bratty little brother stewing for weeks.

That’s all Tim asks.

 _Maturity is overrated,_ Tim decides as he creeps stealthily down the hall, relishing in the full use of his right arm.

He’ll just leave his offering outside the door, knock, and run for it.

* * *

 

> _If you know some that I forgot,_
> 
> _Please stick them into your eye!”_

**Author's Note:**

> Books Mentioned or Referenced: "Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery" - James Howe (1st in series); "Lost in Space: The New Journeys" - J. J. Gardner & Nancy Krulik (series); "Dear Mr. Henshaw" - Beverly Cleary; "Say Cheese and Die!" - R. L. Stine; "The Terrible Truth About Third Grade" - Leslie McGuire; "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" & "The Best School Year Ever - Barbara Robinson; "Matilda" & "James and the Giant Peach" & "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" & "The BFG" - Roald Dahl; "The Headless Cupid" - Zilpha Keatley Snyder; "Sideways Stories from Wayside School" - Louis Sachar (1st in series); "Where the Sidewalk Ends" - Shel Silverstein; "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" - E. L. Konigsburg; and "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" - Judy Blume (1st in series)


End file.
